The mission’s primary goal is to provide students with extensive, hands-on experience of a space project. This will equip them with the necessary skills to confidently enter the high-technology workplace of Europe’s future.

The university collaboration is now working with ALMASpace S.r.l., an Italian company that is a spinoff of satellite group at the University of Bologna.

The mission’s main objectives are to measure the ionizing radiation environment in orbit, to test technologies for future education satellite missions and to take images of the Earth and/or other celestial bodies for outreach purposes.

The universities are providing several of the subsystems such as a microcamera from DTU in Denmark and a radiation detector from the University of Budapest.

The satellite will be around 40kg in mass and measure about 33x33x63cm . It will be launched in 2015-16 and its mission is designed to last for at least six months.

The project is a continuation of an ESA student satellite program:

ESEO is the third mission within ESA’s Education Satellite Programme. It builds upon the experience gained with SSETI Express, launched in 2005, and the YES2 tether and re-entry capsule experiment, launched in 2007.